Her colleagues at Indiana University describe Ostrom as “humble and hardworking,” and another Nobel Prize winner, Vernon Smith, calls her a “remarkable scholar” with a passionate drive to understand human societies in all their variety. A former president of the Public Choice Society and the American Association of Political Science, Ostrom is also one of the most beloved teachers in academia. The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University that she co-directed with her husband, Vincent, is perhaps the ideal model for a research and graduate education center.

But what do we learn from her studies? I would argue that we learn at least three major points of style and substance. First, much of the last century of political and economic discourse has been dominated by a debate between advocates of perfect markets and perfect central planners. The latter strove to demonstrate market failure, then would insist that government would provide the necessary corrective. Ostrom was one of the core thinkers in the social sciences to say, “Hold on. Markets may fail, but government solutions also might not work.” One must always remember that Elinor and Vincent Ostrom are foundational contributors to the theory of Public Choice. But the Ostroms went further than simply demonstrating the possibility of government failure.

Rules In Use

This leads to the second point. In the history of political and economic thought the source of social order has been attributed either to the invisible hand of market coordination (Adam Smith) or the heavy hand of state control (Hobbes). Perhaps one of the best ways to understand Elinor Ostrom’s work is to see it as working out a Hobbesian problem by way of a Smithian solution. That is perhaps a bit of a stretch but not by much. Her work on local public economies and common-pool resources focuses on actual “rules in use” (as opposed to the “rules in form”) that decentralized individuals and groups rely on to make decisions and to coordinate their behavior in order to overcome social dilemmas. It yields an optimistic message about the power of self-governance to succeed even in difficult situations. As my colleague Alex Tabarrok put it, Ostrom sees how, through various voluntary associations, groups transform the common-pool resource situation from a “tragedy of the commons” to an “opportunity of the commons.”

Traditional economic theory argues that public goods cannot be provided through the market. Traditional Public Choice theory argues that government often fails to provide solutions. Ostrom shows that decentralized groups can develop various rule systems that enable social cooperation to emerge through voluntary association.

A point that sometimes trips up readers is that Ostrom often focuses on situations where the technology of parceling property into private plots does not exist. In these situations she studies collective, but non-State decision-making over common-pool resources. While private-property solutions are not employed in such cases, the “rules in use” that do operate accomplish what private property would have accomplished. We find rules that limit access and that make individuals in the group accountable for their misuse of the resource. We also find enforcement of those rules. In short, the analyst must be willing to look at both the form and function of rules in a variety of social situations.

Local Solutions for Local Problems

Diverse institutions at work in different societies promote voluntary cooperation. As social scientists, we have to be able to understand them. There are rules that are in use, rules that are stated but not in use, rules that go by one name but that in practice do something else, and rules that tightly fit use, form, and function. Ostrom has insisted that social scientists must understand the rules that govern human behavior—both the way we interact with one another and the way we interact with nature. Some rules systems promote human betterment through the promotion of peaceful social cooperation and wealth creation; others thwart human progress by ensuring violence and poverty. It is actually that simple, and that profound.

The foundation of the social order of a free people is self-governance, not governmental authority and centralized power. Decentralized decision making that drills deep into the local social dilemmas real people face, that mobilizes incentives within a local rule structure, and that utilizes local knowledge is how the process of institutional development assures that self-governance is effective governance, enabling fallible human beings to reasonably manage scarce resources and the relationships among themselves.

The final point I want to stress concerning Ostrom’s research comes as a methodological message. Her work is humanistic and scientific. She is trying to understand human societies in all their variety. To do so she had to get up close and personal: from local government in California to irrigation systems in Nepal—and everything in between. Her field work in economics and political economy is guided by the logic of human choice. She describes her research program as “a behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action.” If you take away the academic language, it translates into a research program that begins with human beings and their purposes and plans, and ends with their stumbling and groping to find voluntary solutions to difficult social dilemmas through norms, conventions, and rules.

A Message of Hope

Let me conclude by bringing this back to my title: Why should people who care about liberty rejoice in this choice for the prize? There is an ideological importance to the work of Elinor Ostrom. She has not stressed it in her work, but Vincent has ventured into the field of social philosophy. My favorite book of his is The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerabilities of Democracies (1997). In that work Vincent inquires into the preconditions for a self-governing citizenry. A self-governing society, he says, must be composed of citizens fully capable of embracing the “cares of thinking and the troubles of living.” Unfortunately, the machinations of democratic politics—with interest-group manipulation, logrolling, rent-seeking, and the vote motive—tend to undermine the capacity for self-governance among a people.

Nothing in this should be interpreted as deterministically pessimistic. The message is that hope is to be found not in the State but in the people. A society of free and responsible individuals who are able to form voluntary associations will solve the social dilemmas they confront through various means of self-governance.

A Diverse World of Associations

Nobody has done more than Elinor Ostrom, both in her research and in her teaching/mentor capacity at the Workshop in Political Philosophy and Policy Analysis, to help us understand the self-governing rules and institutions that work to elicit cooperation in a wide variety of societies. And nobody has done more to alert us to the damage governments can do when they attempt to impose alien rules on local peoples from afar—especially when their own systems are already addressing social dilemmas in their own way. Elinor demands that we understand and respect institutional diversity in our world, to see the ingenuity and wisdom in local solutions and in the entrepreneurial creativity and resourcefulness of individuals throughout the developed and less-developed world. Transcending the older debates in social science and public policy, Elinor Ostrom’s work emphasizes the richness of the institutional environment and the creative solutions that arise when individuals are free to form associations and work within a network of informal rules that promote individual responsibility and collective accountability.

Supporters of FEE and readers of The Freeman are attracted to the vision of a society of free and responsible individuals. Elinor Ostrom’s research gives us a window into the diverse world of associations that do not fit neatly into the categories of “market” or “State” but nevertheless are essential to peaceful and prosperous social cooperation.

Related posts:

1. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economics
2. Who Deserved the Nobel Prize?
3. The 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics: Some Uncomfortable Reflections

This faith in government is deeply puzzling. Governments have started absurd and terrible wars. Governments have slaughtered scores of millions of their own peoples. In domestic affairs—regulation of the savings-and-loan industry, mortgage lending, hurricane disaster relief, agriculture, college loans, public housing, medical care, to name a few—government has stumbled into embarrassing mega-scandals. One would think that this record of catastrophe and bungling should have made people hesitant to look to government for solutions.

Another thing that should make people skeptical about government is its unseemly modus operandi. Government is not a high-minded institution that approaches the world in a spirit of gentle persuasion and self-sacrifice. Its officials don’t lead by setting an inspiring example. Government relies on laws and on taxation, tools that are based on force, on threats to throw you in jail, or seize your property, or kill you. One would have supposed that idealists, who look askance at the use of force in other contexts, should have turned their backs on this crude approach.

Yet, for the most part, they haven’t. Generation after weary generation, well-meaning social reformers have taken their petitions to government, convinced, as the world in general is convinced, that government is the agency we must use to make the world a better place. When, one wonders, will this fixation fade?

Well, perhaps it is today starting to fade—in the quiet, unnoticed way a great cultural change begins. The straw in the wind is the warm reception given by book clubs and college campuses to an unusual book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time. It recounts how mountain climber Greg Mortenson became a social reformer. Returning from a failed effort to scale the peak K2, Mortenson lost his way and was taken in by Pakistani villagers, who nursed him back to health. One day he saw the children of the village trying to learn school lessons, sitting on a patch of open ground, with no teacher, no books, and writing by scratching with sticks in the dirt. It tore his heart. Mortenson promised the villagers to come back and build a school for them. To make coauthor David Relin’s gracefully written long story short, Mortenson eventually did return, built the school, and founded a charity that has gone on to build some 60 more.

This bestseller is recommended reading at schools across the country, including Montana State, South Dakota State, the University of North Carolina, Carroll College, San Diego State, and Vanderbilt. “It’s just an inspiring story,” said Greg Young, Montana State’s vice provost for undergraduate education. “The implied message is our students could serve the world, change the world, using this as an example.”

The Voluntary Way

What Young didn’t add, because provosts aren’t permitted to contradict the Zeitgeist so directly, is that Mortenson’s example squarely contradicts the assumption that government is the way to change the world. Mortenson built his schools through his own dedication, and by inspiring others to donate funds voluntarily. That he succeeded with a ridiculously tiny budget (his first school cost $12,000) throws into relief the failings of governments with their jillions of tax dollars. In Pakistan, the villages had no schools because the government had failed to live up to its promise to provide them. In Afghanistan, where Mortenson also built schools, the U.S. government makes promises, but the money vanishes into bureaucratic rat holes.

Mortenson’s experience goes beyond demonstrating that voluntarism is more efficient than government. He shows that it is the humane and sensitive method as well. Because he can’t force people to do anything, Mortenson relies on persuasion and his own example of sacrifice and commitment. He meets with locals, listens to their opinions and advice, and tries to learn from them, a personal approach vital in these days of global misunderstanding and tension. The U.S. government, operating in the sweeping, arrogant way governments act, has provoked suspicion and hostility in Muslim communities around the world. Mortenson, following the sensitive, voluntary approach, builds bridges of genuine understanding between cultures.

For example, a local cleric issued a fatwa against Mortenson, arguing that it was un-Islamic to educate girls, as Mortenson was proposing to do. To counter him, Mortenson didn’t get on his high horse and rant. He asked for guidance from his local mentors. They advised him to let friendly clerics submit the issue to the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs in Qom, Iran. Agents of the Council visited the schools and interviewed locals about Mortenson’s morals and character. Eventually, the Council issued its judgment: “Our Holy Koran tells us all children should receive education, including our daughters and sisters. Your [Mortenson's] noble work follows the highest principles of Islam, to tend to the poor and the sick. . . . We direct all clerics in Pakistan not to interfere with your noble intentions. You have our permission, blessings, and prayers.”

Remember, this high praise came from fundamentalist Iranian clerics, a group not disposed to view Americans kindly. Can one imagine a U.S. government agency working so delicately and thus inspiring genuine trust and cross-cultural good will? Episodes like this go far in persuading the reader that Mortenson’s sincere voluntary action is promoting tolerance in a way government never could.

More than a century ago, the bestseller sweeping campuses and book clubs was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a utopian novella that had the federal government in charge of every aspect of economic production and distribution. This management would be so flawless, said Bellamy, that “No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.” Don’t laugh: this book postulating a wise, selfless, unbiased, efficient, prompt, and honest federal government sold millions of copies, and “Bellamy Clubs” were formed all across the country to bring this vision, called “nationalism,” into reality.

Perhaps Mortenson’s book will today inspire youngsters to consider a different “ism,” voluntarism, as the way to make the world a better place. On one level, Mortenson is far ahead of Bellamy. Bellamy’s book was fiction, and his image of government as a wonderful problem-solver was not based on the actual performance of any government. Mortenson’s picture of voluntarism’s glowing success comes from a step-by-step demonstration in the real world.

Related posts:

1. Perspective: Essay Contest Winners
2. From Marx to Mises: a Review Essay
3. Essay on Caring

In 1948 the British government took over ownership of all the railroads. Socialist theory had it that government management would make for greater efficiency, but the reality proved to be the opposite. The railroads drowned in a sea of red ink, and the government responded by closing branch lines, one after the other. In the period between 1962 and 1969, active railroad mileage dropped from 17,500 to 12,100.

The affected communities protested the loss of service, but when political means failed, local activists and philanthropists stepped in to buy and operate the railroads themselves. They formed nonprofit organizations, or “charities” as the British call them, to preserve a distinctive part of their local history.

Today, there are scores of these “heritage railways” in the country, some 57 standard-gauge lines and 42 narrow-gauge ones. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway (NYMR), founded in 1973, is one of the largest and most successful. It runs eight trains a day on a regular schedule throughout the year on a standard-gauge line, climbing from the seacoast town of Whitby on the North Sea through the Yorkshire Moors National Park to the town of Pickering, an 18-mile route. Like most heritage railways, it relies heavily on volunteers who serve as engineers, firemen, conductors, station managers, and signal operators. Each station also has a volunteer maintenance crew that repairs and paints equipment and buildings. When I visited the Pickering station last summer the volunteer maintenance crew was refurbishing the baggage shed, painting it white and green, the official colors of the railroad back in the 1930s. In addition to some 200 volunteers, the NYMR has a substantial paid staff of workers in management, marketing, gift shops, and track and engine maintenance.

Another railway I visited, the Bolton Abbey and Embsay line, is almost entirely volunteer-run. It has only three paid staff members, including a manager, a shops manager, and a part-time secretary; all the other jobs are done by some 60 volunteers. The day I visited I found the volunteer crew in the carriage-restoration shop hard at work. Their supervisor is Peter Barry, a firefighter in Leeds before he took early retirement. He has been volunteering for nine years, working three days a week in the carriage shop, as well as working at night doing paperwork for the operation. I asked him about his motivation for volunteering.

“I always loved trains,” he said. One experience especially moved him. Several years before he started volunteering, he took his grandson to ride a steam train. He saw that the boy was enthralled by the sights, noises, and smells (the dominant odor, by the way, is the smell of your mother’s steam iron). “I tell you, tears came down my eyes,” he said, drawing his fingertips down his cheeks. “And I was just so grateful that somebody had gone to the trouble to save these trains, so that my grandson and I could have this experience.”

Another motive for the volunteers is the camaraderie, which I could see as the men worked and joked together. They often gather in the evenings at the pub, Peter said, where they stand out as an unusually convivial group.

“One night the barmaid asked me—she couldn’t understand why we were carrying on so—‘what do you have in common, you seem to be such good friends?’ ”

Heritage railways are part of the tourism and entertainment industry. The startup and acquisition costs are covered by fundraising, subscriptions, and major philanthropic gifts, but once operational, they get most of their income from the tourists and railroad fans who want to ride them. On a typical road like the NYMR and Bolton Abbey lines, this business amounts to several hundred thousand riders a year. They further cater to the tourist traffic with restaurants and gift shops in the stations, luxury dining trains, and special events like Thomas the Tank Engine day (when the smiley-face locomotive, made popular in the children’s books, is brought in).

Another significant source of income are filmmakers. Steam engines make great visuals, and studios filming period dramas hire the railways to shoot footage. The North Yorkshire Moors Railway has been used for Brideshead Revisited, All Creatures Great and Small, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

In general the heritage railways get no tax funds to cover operating costs. Sometimes, government or quasi-governmental units make grants for property acquisition and capital projects. For example, the Bolton Abbey line got $600,000 from the European Community Development Fund to build an engine shed.

Though their financial support comes from a variety of sources, volunteers are the soul of the preserved railways. Some 23,000 volunteers nationwide founded them and direct them. Like Paul Rimmer, some shovel coal; others man ticket booths, work in gift shops, repair carriages, and inspect track. On occasion, volunteers have constructed roadbed, taking up pick and shovel to clear a path for their beloved trains.

There may be a larger social lesson here. The usual debate over how to provide public services sees only two possible systems: capitalism or socialism. In their 200 years of history, the railroads in Britain have followed a shifting mixture of these models, and neither one has proven to be entirely satisfactory. Both have faced an underlying political dilemma: How do you get customers to pay for monopoly-type services without suspicion and resentment?

Under socialism railroads are subsidized, that is, paid for through taxation. People don’t like that because they don’t like having money taken from them against their will, and they get especially resentful when their tax money supports inefficiency, featherbedding of workers, and overpaid administrators. It was this dissatisfaction that led, after some 40 years of state control, to the privatization of the railroads in 1993.

Capitalism has the advantage of being efficient, but that doesn’t make the public any happier. The problem is that the premise of capitalism is financial self-interest: everyone involved in the enterprise is expected to be selfishly extracting the maximum benefit for himself. Hence, the consumer sees his money going to seemingly excess profits for investors and lavish salaries for administrators. This resentment is especially noticeable on British railways today. The private companies that have leased the railways run them fairly well, but their complex fare schedules and seemingly high prices lead many travelers to believe they are being gouged by private firms trying to maximize profits. The result is that many Britons look fondly at the idea of re-nationalizing the railroads, believing that that would take greed out of the picture. But of course it would bring back the inefficiency of having no bottom line.

The heritage railways have bypassed this dilemma. They represent a third system, which we might call voluntarism. This model has generally not been recognized in the debates on social and economic organization because of the complexity and breadth of the motives it involves. Socialism and capitalism are easier to theorize about because they rest on simple, narrow motives. In the case of socialism, the motive is fear. The government is assumed to know what is best, and it forces people to obey its decisions by threatening them with violence against their person or property. It’s easy to understand how the fear of going to jail will make people pay taxes to fund government’s railroads.

Material Self-Interest

With capitalism, the motive is also simple and basic: material self-interest. Again, we can readily grasp how the desire for money will motivate businessmen to provide a public service.

Voluntarism, on the other hand, rests on the complex and rather subtle motives we might characterize as self-expression. These include idealism, generosity, sociability, and a sense of achievement. These motives are hard to define and measure, so we tend to discount them when thinking about social organization. We tend to be skeptical that an organization based on “mere” charity or enthusiasm or friendship could accomplish anything significant. But, as the volunteer railroads demonstrate, these impulses certainly can have important, socially useful effects.

Do the heritage railways point the way to a brighter future when more public services will be based neither on the coercion of the state nor on the economic self-interest of owners? It’s an ideal worth working toward, but optimism needs to be tempered with caution. The problem is, as we just noted, that the world has yet to recognize and value voluntarism as an independent approach. Hence voluntarism, when it occurs, happens unintentionally, by default. This was how the heritage railways got started. Their founders did not reject socialism and capitalism and consciously devise organizations based on self-expression. They turned to voluntarism because they didn’t have enough political clout to get subsidies and could not interest investors in these uneconomic small lines.

Lacking a philosophic commitment to voluntarism, the heritage railways may be unable over the long run to sustain their volunteer character. It is possible that several generations from now these groups will have lost their idealism and become income-maximizing commercial firms or tax-subsidized branches of government.

But for the present, these railways provide a remarkable, real-world demonstration that human beings are capable of operating a public service grounded on motives of self-expression. And, judging from the enthusiasm I saw on faces in the stations and on the trains, these organizations have found a way, for perhaps the first time in British history, to make passengers love their trains.

Related posts:

1. The Modern Volunteer Army
2. The Befriending Volunteer: Octavia Hill
3. Experiencing Socialist Britain

Thus far the typical libertarian response to the growing clamor has been to challenge the science behind it. Now it really is the scientific consensus that global warming occurred during the twentieth century. What is not so obvious is that (1) humans caused this warming and (2) this warming is necessarily bad.

Although it is interesting to explore the question of whether science has been perverted in the cause of environmentalism, there is a danger for libertarians in pinning their entire case on this strategy. After all, every serious student of science knows that when it comes to empirical claims, we never achieve certainty. For example, even if today one thinks that there are insurmountable problems facing the theory of manmade global warming, one still must accept the possibility that new evidence or theoretical advances could indicate that the environmentalists are perfectly right. Another possibility is that there is some other, similar disaster lurking unsuspected.

For these reasons, I believe it is crucial to accept provisionally, for the sake of argument, the scientific claims behind the case for manmade global warming. In the present article I will demonstrate that it still would not follow that the taxes and other regulations typically proposed by greens are the best way to address the problem. Just as the free market is still the optimal economic arrangement, regardless of how many citizens are angels or devils, so too does the free market outperform government intervention, regardless of the fragility of Earth’s ecosystems.

When trying to determine if the free market is to blame for possibly dangerous carbon emissions, a logical starting point is to list the numerous ways that government policies encourage the very activities that Al Gore and his friends want us to curtail.

The U.S. government has subsidized many activities that burn carbon: it has seized land through eminent domain to build highways, funded rural electrification projects, and fought wars to ensure Americans’ access to oil. After World War II it played a key role in the mass exodus of the middle class from urban centers to the suburbs, chiefly through encouraging mortgage lending.

Every American schoolchild has heard of the bold transcontinental railroad (finished with great ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah) promoted by the federal government. Historian Burt Folsom explains that due to the construction contracts, the incentive was to lay as much track as possible between points A and B—hardly an approach to economize on carbon emissions from the wood- and coal-burning locomotives. For a more recent example, consider John F. Kennedy’s visionary moon shot. I’m no engineer, but I’ve seen the takeoffs of the Apollo spacecraft and think it’s quite likely that the free market’s use of those resources would have involved far lower CO2 emissions. While myriad government policies have thus encouraged carbon emissions, at the same time the government has restricted activities that would have reduced them. For example, there would probably be far more reliance on nuclear power were it not for the overblown regulations of this energy source. For a different example, imagine the reduction in emissions if the government would merely allow market-clearing pricing for the nation’s major roads, thereby eliminating traffic jams! The pollution from vehicles in major urban areas could be drastically cut overnight if the government set tolls to whatever the market could bear—or better yet, sold bridges and highways to private owners.

Of course, there is no way to determine just what the energy landscape in America would look like if these interventions had not occurred. Yet it is entirely possible that on net, with a freer market economy, in the past we would have burned less fossil fuel and today we would be more energy efficient.

Even if it were true that reliance on the free-enterprise system makes it difficult to curtail activities that contribute to global warming, still the undeniable advantages of unfettered markets would allow humans to deal with climate change more easily. For example, the financial industry, by creating new securities and derivative markets, could crystallize the “dispersed knowledge” that many different experts held in order to coordinate and mobilize mankind’s total response to global warming. For instance, weather futures can serve to spread the risk of bad weather beyond the local area affected. Perhaps there could arise a market betting on the areas most likely to be permanently flooded. That may seem ghoulish, but by betting on their own area, inhabitants could offset the cost of relocating should the flooding occur. Creative entrepreneurs, left free to innovate, will generate a wealth of alternative energy sources. (State intervention, of course, tends to stifle innovations that threaten the continued dominance of currently powerful special interests, such as oil companies—for example, the state of North Carolina recently fined Bob Teixeira for running his car on soybean oil.)

Private insurers have a strong incentive to assess the potential effects of global warming without bias in order to price their policies optimally—if they overestimate the risk, they will lose business to lower-priced rivals; if they are too sanguine about the dangers, they will lose money once the claims start rolling in. Individuals finding their homes or businesses threatened by rising sea levels will find it easier to relocate to the extent that unfettered markets have made them wealthier. Industrial manufacturers, as long as they are held liable for the negative environmental effects of their production processes—a traditional common-law liability from which state policies intended to “promote industry” have often sought to shield manufacturers—will strive to develop technologies that minimize the environmental impact of their activities without sacrificing efficiency. Government interventions and “five-year plans,” even when they are sincere attempts to protect the environment rather than disguised schemes to benefit some powerful lobby, lack the profit incentive and are protected from the competitive pressures that drive private actors to seek an optimal cost-benefit tradeoff.

If the situation truly becomes dire, it will be free-market capitalism that allows humans to develop techniques for sucking massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, and to colonize the oceans and outer space. Beyond these futuristic possibilities, the obvious responses to global warming—such as more houses with AC, sturdier sea walls, and better equipment to evacuate flooded regions—are again only feasible when the free market is unleashed.

It is the poorest people and nations that stand to suffer the most if the worst-case scenario for global warming is realized, and the only reliable way to alleviate their poverty, and thus help protect them from those effects, is the free market.

Can the Market Meet the Threat Head-On?

In the first section I summarized some of the ways governments inadvertently contribute to the very activities that allegedly cause dangerous global warming; in the second I sketched some of the ways that free markets allow humans to better adapt to climate change. However, I haven’t really tackled the problem directly. Am I conceding that with a worldwide problem the market—which is just dandy for one-on-one interactions—can’t match the concerted “will of the people” working through their elected representatives for a common solution?

Of course not. Even when economic transactions generate so-called negative externalities (activities that shower harms on third parties), I still contend that the free market is the best institution for identifying and reducing the problems.

One way negative externalities can be addressed without turning to state coercion is public censure of individuals or groups widely perceived to be flouting core moral principles or trampling the common good, even if their actions are not technically illegal. Large, private companies and prominent, wealthy individuals are generally quite sensitive to public pressure campaigns.

To cite just one recent, significant example, Temple Grandin, a notable advocate for the humane treatment of livestock, asserts that McDonald’s is the world leader in improving slaughterhouse conditions. While many executives at the fast-food giant genuinely may be concerned with the welfare of cattle, pigs, and chickens, undoubtedly a strong element of self-interest is also at work here, as the company realizes that corporate image affects consumers’ buying decisions.

But that self-interest does not negate the laudable outcome of the pressure McDonald’s has applied to its suppliers to meet the stringent standards it has set for animal-handling facilities. Similarly, to the degree that the broad public regards manmade global warming as a serious problem, companies will strive to be seen as “good corporate citizens” that are addressing the matter. And this isn’t ivory-tower speculation on my part—I can see the “green friendly” ads already.

Critics of libertarianism sometimes denigrate it as a political program of “market fundamentalism” that, if put into practice, would reduce all human values to the price they can fetch as mere commodities. But that is a caricature of the social arrangements advocated by any sensible libertarian. The great figures of classical-liberal and libertarian thought have always recognized the vital contributions that nonmarket institutions, such as churches, families, charities, social clubs, communities of scholars and their students, art foundations, conservation groups, neighborhood associations, and youth athletic leagues, make to the healthy functioning of a free society. What libertarians offer as an alternative to statism is not a social order that judges every human interaction solely on a miserly calculation of profit or loss, but a society in which every desirable form of voluntary association is allowed to flourish, free from coercive interference by the state.

Customary Law

Besides the samples listed above, most libertarians recognize private or customary law as another important, nonmarket source of social order. A historical case in point is the Anglo-American common-law tradition in which legal norms evolved spontaneously from the customs of the people to whom it applied, rather than through legislation and state planning deliberately aimed at achieving some “public good.” The many centuries during which the common law sustained civic order in the face of inevitable divergences between individual citizens’ own interests demonstrate that a successful legal order does not inevitably require state sponsorship. The common law has shown itself to be fully capable of dealing with a number of issues that, while not exhibiting the worldwide scope of global warming, are still similar to our present concern in arising from the cumulative effects of many individual actions, each of which, regarded in isolation, appears to be unproblematic and not subject to legal sanction. For instance, the salmon-fishing streams of Scotland are a valuable natural resource, and the communities along them have developed quite successful institutions for ensuring the value of the streams is maintained, including private policing and legal penalties for overfishing and for polluting the water.

The many cases in which voluntary solutions to problems of collective choice have worked pose an empirical embarrassment for those who argue that “public goods” must be provided by the government. Most advocates of compulsory solutions to pollution abatement, for example, would assert that voluntary efforts will be vitiated by “free riding.” If individuals are not forced to contribute their fair share toward addressing these problems, this argument runs, each person rationally will hold back and hope others will pay for the proposed solution, since any free riders would gain the benefits (such as clean air) anyway. Since almost no one likes to be “the sucker,” it follows that the amount of resources devoted to the provision of the public good will fall woefully shy of the total that would be available if each person gave the amount he’d be willing to give if only he could count on everyone else pitching in equally. The sole solution that can be imagined is for the members of a society to create a “social contract” by which they are forced to pay for pollution abatement.

However, Anthony de Jasay notes in his book The State that this argument is severely flawed. If people cannot solve public-goods problems through voluntary cooperation, how can they rely on politicians’ promises to do so? There is no external authority to enforce those promises. There is only public opinion, the same thing that would enforce voluntary solutions. Moreover, government is itself a “public good” in the sense that free riders benefit from the efforts of those who try to get the government to produce public goods such as clean air.

Is Temperature a Public Good?

Another consideration is that the earth’s temperature isn’t such a public good after all. That is, certain people really do have more at stake, particularly if the warming is moderate. For example, if Manhattan became submerged because of rising sea levels, that calamity would not affect every human being equally. The residents of Manhattan and the owners of its skyscrapers would be hurt far more than people living in inland China. Because all the various potential dangers of global warming affect particular people more intensively than others, it is these groups that (in a free market) would have the incentive to reduce CO2 concentrations. For example, if rising sea levels would cause $10 trillion in damage to a comparatively small group of wealthy individuals, that’s a huge “pie” that the wealthy can offer others to motivate them to reduce emissions.

Despite my optimism about the potential to deal with environmental problems through voluntary means, I don’t wish to be misunderstood: If the official global-warming story is true, it presents a serious problem that humanity will find difficult to solve through voluntary means. But this isn’t a strike against voluntarism—of course a difficult problem will be difficult to solve! By the very same token, the government doesn’t do a terrible job at collecting stray dogs, because that’s a very simple task. When it comes to harder assignments, such as stopping terrorism or reducing teen pregnancy, the government’s record is quite a bit worse.

The very features of the official global-warming scenario that hamper purely private solutions would apply equally to government efforts. For example, even if the U.S. government passed draconian measures at home, that alone wouldn’t be enough if China and Indiadon’t follow suit. And just as private companies in a free market may have an incentive to pollute if they can get away with it, so the state, under the influence of special-interest groups and run by leaders always tempted to ignore the public good in favor of increasing their own power and wealth, can have incentives to allow more pollution than is optimal. (It should be clear the “best” amount of pollution is not zero, because even using fire to cook generates some pollutants, and I doubt that anyone but the most misanthropic, fanatical nature worshippers want to reverse all of the last 40,000 years of human progress.)

As in all debates over public versus private choice, it’s inappropriate to measure a realistic free-market response to global warming against an idealized government program. We must try to envision what real people would do if their property rights were respected and compare that scenario with the probable outcome of actual politicians in today’s world being given a blank check in the name of saving the earth.

Government programs don’t ameliorate world poverty or sickness, and no libertarian would deny that these are serious problems. So even if manmade global warming is a real threat, why should we expect governments to get it right on this issue?

Related posts:

1. Global Warming Revisited
2. Higher CO2, More Global Warming, and Less Extinction?
3. Global Warming and the Layman

But Britain in the 19th century was a special place, the legendary “workshop of the world.” London had become the capital of capital, with private investment in agriculture and manufacturing burgeoning at a record-breaking pace in the latter half of the century. The year Victoria ascended to the throne, 1837, saw fewer than 300 patent applications for new inventions, but by the end of the century the number exceeded 25,000 annually. Per capita income on the eve of World War I was three times what it was a century before and life expectancy had risen by 25 percent. There were many more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, but British entrepreneurship was feeding and clothing them better than the world had ever experienced. It was the greatest flowering of problem-solving creativity, ingenuity, and innovation in history.

Colin Pullinger, a carpenter’s son from Selsea, typified the 19th century British entrepreneur. He designed a “perpetual mousetrap” that could humanely catch a couple dozen mice per trap in a single night, and then sold 2 million of them. Perhaps Emerson had Pullinger in mind when he famously wrote, “If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

As the 1800s drew to a close, the framework that made possible these extraordinary achievements — capitalism — fell under assault. As poverty declined massively for the first time, the very presence of the poverty that remained prompted impatient calls for forcible redistribution of wealth. Around the world, Marxists painted capitalists as exploiters and monopolists. In Britain, Charles Kingsley argued that Christianity demanded a socialist order, and the Fabian Society was formed to help bring it about. Many unscrupulous businessmen turned to the state for favors and protections unavailable to them in competitive markets. Would anyone come to the defense of capitalism with as much vigor and passion as those who opposed it?

At least one group did: the Liberty and Property Defence League. Though its work has been largely forgotten, what the world learned about socialism in the following century surely vindicates its message. Its name derived from the members’ belief that liberty and property were inseparable and that unless successfully defended, both could be swept away by the beguiling temptations of a coercive state.

The founder of the League in 1882 was a pugnacious Scot by the name of Lord Elcho, later the 10th earl of Wemyss as a member of the House of Lords and thereafter known simply as “Wemyss.” Originally elected to parliament in 1841 as a protectionist Tory, he eventually embraced free trade and repeal of the Corn Laws by 1846. He later evolved into a full-throated advocate for what we today would call “classical liberal” ideas. At the organization’s third annual meeting in 1885, he expressed his hope that its efforts to educate the public would “cause such a flood as will sweep away, in the course of time, all attempts at state interference in the business transactions of life in the case of every Briton of every class . . . . No nation can prosper with undue state interference, and unless its people are allowed to manage their own affairs in their own way . . . .”

Wemyss and his friends rounded up spokespersons and financial support. They enlisted writers and public speakers. They published and circulated essays and leaflets. The organization operated as an activist think tank with a lobbying arm. The League attempted to mobilize public opinion against specific bills, functioning as a “day-to-day legislative watchdog” in the view of historian Edward Bristow. It even arranged testimony before parliamentary hearings. One League pamphlet attacked the introduction of “grandmotherly legislation” as a transgression against the freedom of contract. Armed with arguments provided by League members and sympathizers, Wemyss’ allies in Parliament killed hundreds of interventionist bills in the 1880s and 1890s.

Opponents often accused the League of being motivated by its members’ bottom line drive for profits, but in actuality its philosophical ideals were paramount. Among its members were some of the brightest intellects of the era, Herbert Spencer being perhaps the most notable. Author of the libertarian classic, “The Man Versus the State,” Spencer was the best-selling philosopher of his day and was nominated for a Nobel in literature. Spencer saw liberty as the absence of coercion and as the most indispensable prerequisite for human progress. The ownership of property was an individual right that could not be morally infringed unless an individual first threatened the property of another. Spencer has been demonized as an apostle of a heartless “survival of the fittest” Darwinism by those who choose to ignore or distort his central message, namely that individual self-improvement can accomplish more progress than political action. One creates wealth, the other merely takes and reapportions it.

Auberon Herbert was a Spencer acolyte whose championship of voluntarism found fertile soil among fellow League members. His now century-old warning about the danger of state intervention is positively prophetic: “No amount of state education will make a really intelligent nation; no amount of Poor Laws will place a nation above want; no amount of Factory Acts will make us better parents . . . . To have our wants supplied from without by a huge state machinery, to be regulated and inspected by great armies of officials, who are themselves slaves to the system which they administer, will in the long run teach us nothing, (and) will profit us nothing.”

In a 1975 essay in The Historical Journal from Cambridge University Press, historian Bristow contended that the Liberty and Property Defence League changed the language in one important, lasting way. Prior to the 1880s, “individualism” was a term of opprobrium in most quarters, referring to “the atomism and selfishness of liberal society.” The League appropriated the word and elevated its general meaning to one of respect for the rights and uniqueness of each person.

But was the League successful in its mission to thwart the socialist impulse? In the short run, lamentably, no. By 1914, socialists had convinced large numbers of Britons that they could (and should) vote themselves a share of other people’s property. Two world wars and a depression in between seemed to cement the socialists’ claim that their vision for society was inevitable.

Good ideas, however, have a way of resisting attempts to quash them. Bad ideas sooner or later fail and teach a valuable lesson or two in the process. Britain and most of the world gave socialism in all its varieties one hell of a run in the 20th century. The disastrous results now widely acknowledged underscore the warnings of those who said that we could depart from liberty and property only at our peril.

The warriors of the Liberty and Property Defence League may have lost the battle in their lifetimes, but a hundred years later they offer prophetic wisdom to those who will listen.

Related posts:

1. Prophets, Jurists, and Property
2. Book Review ~ Property Matters by James V. DeLong and Property Rights: Understanding Government Takings and Environmental Regulation by Nancie G. Marzulla and Roger J. Marzulla
3. Economics and Property Rights

In Libertarianism: For and Against (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), two philosophers debate the merits of libertarianism. Arguing in favor is Professor Tibor Machan, a contributing editor to The Freeman. His opponent is Professor Craig Duncan, who attempts a refutation of libertarianism and seeks to persuade readers that they should embrace “democratic liberalism.”

It is always welcome to find a debate over a serious topic, and whether we would be better off with government limited to libertarian “night watchman” functions or with whatever government emerges under “democratic liberalism” is to my mind as serious as philosophical questions get. I found the debate in the book enlightening, especially for the insight it gives us into the mind of the nonlibertarian.

Like many Americans, Duncan commits four errors that are common among non-libertarians both of the “left” and the “right.”

The first mistake in this set is to overestimate the problems of a free society. To nonlibertarians, the thought of a truly free society is frightening. They imagine that a few wealthy individuals would crush the rest with their enormous economic power, abuse the environment, establish monopolies, underpay workers, discriminate against people in unpopular groups, ruin the morality of the people, and much more. Nonlibertarians don’t think their own freedom should be curtailed, but believe that in the absence of laws to make others behave properly, the nation would become a Hobbesian horror.

Closely related to that mistake is the underestimation of the ability of free people to solve problems. Poverty, pollution, discrimination—those and many other problems—will fester and grow in a free society because the poor, oppressed people can accomplish nothing against them. To suggest that voluntarism can work usually gets the nonlibertarian’s eyes rolling, accompanied by a dismissive shake of the head. We just can’t rely on voluntary action to take care of society’s problems.

Nonlibertarians don’t just misjudge the free society; they also misjudge government. The first of their errors here is to overestimate the capacity for laws and coercive programs to actually solve socioeconomic problems. Many nonlibertarians believe, for example, that poverty will be alleviated if only the state spends enough money on a welfare “safety net.” Many others believe drug addiction will go away if only the state tries hard enough to enforce the laws against drugs. And if poverty and drug addiction persists after decades of government efforts against them, the explanation is never that government is the wrong instrument to use, but that insufficient money has been appropriated, corrupt or uncaring people have been in charge, or that something else has undermined the efficacy of the programs.

The second of the errors regarding government is to underestimate the harm done by laws and policies designed to help people. Let someone propose a new government program to solve a socioeconomic problem and rarely will you hear a nonlibertarian utter a sentence beginning, “But if we do that, the following harmful consequences will ensue. . . .” So if someone advocates price controls to keep a necessity, say medical care, “affordable,” do not expect a nonlibertarian to point out that artificially low prices will lead to shortages. In fact, the counterproductivity of government action is usually not merely underestimated but completely ignored.

With that discussion as background, let’s turn to Duncan ’s argument that libertarianism is unacceptable. To understand why he insists on a coercive and far-more-extensive state than libertarian theory prescribes, we must first try to comprehend his belief that the most important function of a political system is to advance “human dignity.” While he uses the term repeatedly, he never clearly explains it. There’s an imposing ring to the term, but exactly what does Duncan mean?

His favorite phrase, one that seems to capture his sense of what “human dignity” means, is “the ability to shape one’s life.” Now a libertarian would say, “Sure—leave people alone and they can shape their lives as they think best.” But Duncan maintains that the state must take positive steps to enable people to “meaningfully” shape their lives. Mere freedom is not enough. Government must do things for and give things to the mass of people who wouldn’t be able to live a “dignified” existence without its assistance. (“Dignity” seems to boil down to a rather misleading synonym for “comfortable.”)

In Duncan’s view, poorer people can’t “shape their lives” unless assisted by the state with money, housing, medical care, and so forth. Furthermore, the government needs to intervene in the labor market to prevent discrimination that would keep members of unpopular groups from finding employment and also to have minimum-wage legislation ensuring that all workers will be paid “decently.” A complete list of all the actions required of government by the supposed need to help people lead dignified lives could go on for pages.

If we examine the statist egalitarian measures Duncan advocates, we see the four errors on exhibit. He makes both estimation errors about freedom and both estimation errors about government action. To illustrate, I propose to examine a policy that Duncan insists on and which is widely favored among nonlibertarians—the minimum wage.

The Minimum Wage and the Free Society

According to Duncan , the libertarian policy of nonintervention in the economy is flawed for many reasons, among them that it allows employers to pay workers at rates that aren’t adequate for the workers to “shape their lives” and live with “dignity.” He writes, “Wages below a decent minimum treat workers more like disposable instruments for others’ needs than people with their own lives to live. The current level of $5.15—which totals a mere $10,300 a year for a full-time worker who works fifty weeks per year—is surely too low.” (The national minimum wage was just raised to $5.85, and will rise to $7.25 in the summer of 2009.) Duncan doesn’t inform us how high the minimum wage needs to go, but he is absolutely certain that it must be raised significantly.

Recall the first type of error in the quadrant, that of overestimating the problems of a free society, and then note Duncan ’s fevered rhetoric. Employers who pay workers only the minimum wage are said to treat them like “disposable instruments.” That makes it sound as though people employed at the minimum wage are rather in the same situation as were prisoners in the Soviet Gulag, where millions of them actually were disposed of—literally worked to death under astoundingly inhumane conditions. Now Duncan isn’t saying that the American minimum-wage employee is worked to death, but his “treating them like disposable instruments” talk is calculated to make the reader think that workers are suffering terribly and that their employers are hardly better than slave masters. Is freedom, even when limited in the mixed economy, really so awful as this nonlibertarian depicts it?

Duncan ’s eagerness to attack the morality of those who employ workers without ensuring that they are paid enough to “shape their lives” is the first point we should examine. Their actions certainly don’t indicate that they regard low-paid workers as “disposable” since they want them to continue working for them and frequently grant pay increases to induce them to stay rather than look for other employment. No employer can force anyone to work or prevent an employee from quitting. When an employer contracts with an individual for labor, he is not mistreating the individual simply because the rate of pay is lower than Duncan would accept.

Next, let’s ask how serious the supposed problem of minimum-wage employment is. Undoubtedly it would be hard to support yourself, much less a family, on only the earnings from a minimum-wage job, but very few people do. The typical minimum-wage worker is a teenager living with his parents, earning some spending money. Many others are older people with other sources of household income besides the minimum-wage job. People like that can “shape their lives” tolerably well. It is only a small fraction of those who work at the minimum wage who fit Duncan ’s image of struggling, suffering people. But there are some, and that brings us to the next mistake Duncan makes.

Nonlibertarians underestimate the ability of free people to deal with problems. If some people struggle and suffer because they can’t earn enough money, why not assist them through voluntary means? Duncan, however, does not want to hear about voluntarism, airily dismissing the idea that there could ever be enough funds and donations to solve the poverty problem. Why? Because, he points out, many individuals and businesses take advantage of tax “loopholes” to minimize their taxes. This is a non sequitur. The deduction for charitable giving is one of the main “loopholes” Americans take advantage of. Duncan never explains how he concludes that private charity could never be sufficient from the premise that people and businesses prefer to keep as much of their income as they legally can. There’s simply no logical connection. The fact that people would rather put their money toward purposes of their own choosing rather than see it go to the vast array of government expenditures—most of which have nothing to do with the alleviation of poverty—tells us nothing about the extent of their desire to help others in need.

A libertarian polity would have far lower government expenditures and would therefore impose far less drag on the economy. More resources would be available for production; more jobs would be created and prices would fall. As a result, there would be less poverty. Furthermore, private charitable groups would expand to replace inefficient government programs and agencies, and consequently there would be more effective assistance to the poor than currently. Actually, it is the mega-state that ensures there will never be enough resources to alleviate poverty.

Evidence for the efficacy of voluntary programs to relieve poverty abounds. Long before there were government welfare programs or any income tax to avoid, America had a vibrant network of charities to assist the poor and self-help mutual-aid societies. Anti-libertarians who pooh-pooh voluntarism would do well to read David Beito’s book, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State. With the revolution in communications and information of the last decade, it is now easier than ever to identify and assist individuals who truly are struggling in life. Contrary to Duncan ’s beliefs, voluntary action would be much more effective than the blunt, clumsy policies of minimum-wage laws or welfare entitlements.

Mistakes Regarding Government

Looking at Duncan’s case for the minimum wage and increasing its current level, we also see the predictable mistakes that nonlibertarians make regarding government action.

First, he overestimates the capacity of government to solve the supposed problem of poverty among low-wage workers. Although Duncan doesn’t say exactly how much higher the minimum wage needs to go to guarantee all workers enough income to “shape their lives,” let’s assume that if we doubled it, that would be sufficient. Make it illegal for an employer to pay any worker less than $11.70 per hour and poverty goes away for those workers who used to earn between the current minimum and the new amount. Right?

Not so fast. Employers tend to make adjustments when the cost of any factor of production goes up, and the cost of labor is no different. Putting aside the likelihood that some workers would be terminated—we will get to that in our fourth error—employers have ways of offsetting the mandated increase in the cost of labor, which would affect all workers who had been making less than the minimum previously. Break time might be reduced. Previously “free” benefits such as uniforms might be charged against pay. Unless the minimum-wage advocates are prepared to also legislate away managerial freedom (as some are), workers won’t benefit as much as expected from their vicarious generosity.

Furthermore, since most workers who start at minimum wage earn pay increases within a short time, all that the mandatory wage increase does is to accelerate somewhat the time at which they start earning more. While the minimum-wage advocate may think that by increasing it, he “lifts people out of poverty,” the truth is that most workers lift themselves out of poverty. Government action accomplishes much less than people like Duncan believe.

Now we come to the final quadrant of the matrix of mistakes, namely, the tendency of nonlibertarians to underestimate the harm done by government action. If they don’t underestimate it, they ignore it entirely.

With regard to the minimum wage, economists have long understood that if government sets a price floor below which no transaction may legally be entered into, the result will be a surplus of the item. There won’t be enough demand to buy up the supply. In the labor market, the word for that is unemployment. Therefore, most people who have studied labor markets conclude that raising the minimum wage will lead to some job losses among current workers and a reduction in job opportunities for people who will be trying to enter the labor market in the future. Raising the minimum wage benefits workers who keep their jobs—predictably, those regarded as the most productive and promising employees—but at the expense of the workers who are laid off immediately and all future workers who will find fewer opportunities available to them. Fewer legal opportunities, anyway. People who are priced out of legal employment will often resort to illegal employment.

Duncan is aware of that criticism, but he dismisses it. He does so by pointing to a 1995 study by economists David Card and Alan Krueger, which found no disemployment effect in the fast-food industry when New Jersey raised its minimum wage. That’s enough for Duncan to brush away the argument that this interference with the price system is harmful. His conscience is clear.

It shouldn’t be. The Card-Krueger study certainly does not disprove that raising the price of labor reduces the demand for labor. All it shows is that the authors did not find a short-run increase in unemployment in a small slice of the labor market at a time when the economy was growing robustly. It is logically impossible to get from the findings of that study to Duncan ’s conclusion that increasing the cost of hiring low-skilled workers will have no effect on their employment prospects.

As an aside, one reason why nonlibertarians ignore the harm done by government intervention is that the harm usually is felt by other people. If Duncan were thinking of taking some medicine but his wife pointed out that a dozen clinical studies show that the medication often has serious side effects in men his age, would he dismiss all that evidence just because he read that one doctor somewhere said he didn’t think it hurt his patients? I doubt it. People tend to behave more cautiously when they stand to bear a personal cost from being wrong. When it comes to grand social experiments, people who are well-off aren’t so cautious about the harmful effects their experiments will have on others.

Besides creating higher unemployment among low-skilled workers, the minimum wage has another bad consequence, namely that it encourages people to look to politics to get what they want. Duncan thinks he sees a brighter future for the poor through legislation that supposedly helps them, but many other people will also use politics to get things they want, things that may undo whatever benefit Duncan expects from the political actions he favors. Business firms will try to obtain competition-stifling laws that drive up prices or subsidies that come at taxpayer expense and divert resources from more productive uses. Professional groups will seek government favors, especially licensing laws that keep down the number of practitioners in their field, thus increasing the cost of services. (The legal profession plays that game beautifully, with the result that many poor people cannot afford legal assistance when they need it.) Regulations promoted by environmental organizations will drive up the cost of housing, gasoline, and many other items everyone needs. The liberal democracy to which Duncan and others like him look for the passage of minimum-wage laws, welfare programs, and so on inevitably grows into a Leviathan that will do just about anything except leave people alone. In the effort to help a few people shape their lives, Duncan ’s political meddling opens the floodgates to limitless government tampering that misshapes everyone’s life. Unfortunately, that’s a problem he can’t see.

Nonlibertarians advocate a vast array of governmental laws and policies that drain away people’s liberty. Most of the time the problems they want to eliminate are real, but have their roots not in freedom, but rather in existing laws and policies that benefit a few at the expense of the many. They want to mandate that we behave in certain ways and prohibit us from behaving in others. I submit that whether it’s the minimum wage, Social Security, public education, welfare, the war on drugs, or anything else, when you examine their arguments, you always find the four errors I have outlined here. They overestimate the problems of freedom while underestimating the ability of people to deal with the problems that do exist without the use of coercion, and they overestimate the ability of government to solve problems while underestimating the damage that government does when it interferes with the spontaneous social order.

The next time you hear someone say, “We need to have the government do this . . . ,” examine his argument carefully. See if you don’t find that he has made those four mistakes.

Related posts:

1. Some Mistakes of Marx
2. Some Mistakes of Marx
3. Macro Mistakes

Herbert, who was born in 1838, died a century ago in 1906. As well as being a member of Parliament, he was a writer, editor, and political philosopher. He advocated government “strictly limited to its legitimate duties in defense of self-ownership and individual rights.” Therefore, he said, it must be supported by voluntary contributions. 

Unlike many intellectuals, Herbert acted on his avowed beliefs in a manner that made him, as the late Chris Tame put it, “probably the leading English libertarian” in the early twentieth century. His writing, in the words of Benjamin Tucker, the libertarian-anarchist editor of Liberty, was “a searching exposure of the inherent evil of State systems, and a glorious assertion of the inestimable benefits of voluntary action and free competition.” But in addition, he founded the journal Free Life and The Personal Rights and Self Help Association, was an anti-war leader, and more. 

(For more about Herbert’s life and philosophy, see his collection, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays, Liberty Press, 1978, and Eric Mack’s “Voluntaryism: The Political Thought of Auberon Herbert,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1978.) 

Auberon Herbert rejected the term anarchism for his beliefs because he believed in government empowered solely for the defensive use of force. Instead, he chose the term voluntaryism because it captured a characteristic that is true of “complete liberty in all things,” but not of any alternative social “ism”: the no coercive “respect for the rights of others.” In his words, “under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them.” 

If one accepts that every individual owns himself, which Herbert called “supreme moral rights,” there is only one consistent form of social organization: mutual consent. From that he derived his view of the role of government: “[T]herefore force may be employed on behalf of these rights, but not in opposition to them.” Any other state-imposed compulsion is illegitimate because it must inherently violate mutual consent, and therefore self-ownership. But such illegitimate compulsion is the core of government as we have long experienced it. 

At a time in history when, despite occasional garnishes of boilerplate rhetoric in favor of freedom, the practical philosophy of those in the innumerable tentacles of our governments is that they own as much of each individual as they choose to, Herbert’s moral challenge to the idea that others have “a commission to decide what [their] brother-man shall do or not do” is essential to the defense of the liberty that remains to Americans. And it is equally important to any hope of expanding that liberty. 

Herbert started from what he discerned as “the question always waiting for an answer: Do you believe in force and authority, or do you believe in liberty?” Self ownership led him to the answer that we must “reject compulsion in every form.” 

Herbert identified self-ownership as the core of John Locke’s trinity of “life, liberty and property.” Further, he understood that property rights derived from self ownership were the only solid basis for our mutual pursuit of happiness: “[E]ach man must be left free so to exercise his faculties and so to direct his energies as he may think fit to produce happiness—with one most important limitation. His freedom in this pursuit must not interfere with the exactly corresponding freedom of others.” The sole way to achieve this was through “the fullest recognition of property.” He drew the ominous implication for our era: “Destroy the rights of property, and you will also destroy both the material and the moral foundations of liberty.” 

Herbert also showed the logical contradiction between self ownership and the use of government coercion to pursue happiness: “No man can have rights over another man unless he first have rights over himself. He cannot possess the rights to direct the happiness of another man, unless he possess rights to direct his own happiness: if we grant him the latter right, this is at once fatal to the former.” 

Herbert recognized that without defending self ownership and its inevitable implications, there could be no such thing as true morality. “Force rests on no moral foundations,” he said, because “without freedom of choice . . . there are no such things as true moral qualities.” 

Further, he saw that justice (in its legitimate meaning, applicable “for all,” as opposed to the many variants that apply only to some by denying equal treatment to others) was only possible under self-ownership: “Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man.” And the only way to achieve that is to recognize that “If we are self-owners, neither an individual, nor a majority, nor a government, can have rights of ownership in other men.” 

Herbert reasoned further that once we accept self-ownership, logic must lead us to also accept that “All these various wholes, without any exception, in which an individual is included . . . exist for the sake of the individual. They exist to do his service. . . . If they did not minister to his use, if they do not profit him, they would have no plea to exist.” In other words, because it is not true that “numbers . . . take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest those rights in others,” no one can be legitimately forced to support any group decision against his will. Despite this fact, “Far the larger amount of intolerance that exists in the world is the result of our own political arrangements, by which we compel ourselves to struggle, man against man.” 

The Moral Standpoint 

Auberon Herbert thought deeply about self-ownership. He recognized and was repulsed by “the odiousness of compelling men to act against their own wishes,” not only from pragmatic considerations, but especially from a moral standpoint. He even put his beliefs in verse, as in the chorus to his poem, Libertas in Excelsis:

Each man shall be free, whoever he be, 

And none shall say to him nay! 

There is only one rule for the wise and the fool— 

To follow his own heart’s way. 

For the heart of the free, whoever he be, 

May be stirred to a better thing; 

But the heart of the slave lies chill in its grave, 

And knows not the coming of spring.

In our era, where myriad government bodies tax and regulate away individuals’ self-ownership far beyond that when Herbert wrote, we need to hear and act on his compelling case for liberty, with its voluntary arrangements, as the organizing principle of  society. As he recognized, the alternative involves the widespread abuse of people’s rights and is ultimately futile: “All the methods of restriction . . . are wrong and will only end in disappointment.” 

When Auberon Herbert chose “voluntaryism” to express his political philosophy, logically derived from the principle of self-ownership, he did not pick a term that modern spin doctors would have chosen. But it is hard to imagine a more promising future than that which it envisions, especially in contrast to the direction society seems to be headed today: “Voluntaryism . . . denies that any good or lasting work can be built upon the compulsion of others. . . . It invites all men to abandon the barren problems of force, and to give themselves up to the happy problems of liberty and friendly co-operation; to join in thinking out—while first and foremost we give to the individual those full rights over himself and over whatever is his. . . how we can do all these things, without at any point touching with the least of our fingers the hateful instrument of an aggressive and unjustifiable compulsion.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays by Auberon Herbert
2. A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1979/6
3. Freedom In Transactions

Washington, D.C., is filled with professions of good intentions by politicians and bureaucrats as they steadily strip away Americans’ liberty and money. The political class uses even the most serious social problem to cement its control.

Elections, which H. L. Mencken called advance auctions of stolen goods, bring out the worst in politicians. But it’s better to have elections than not, even though the political world usually looks about the same whether the Democrats or Republicans win.

Nevertheless, America, in contrast to its government, remains special. The uniqueness is most evident when traveling abroad.

Not so much when visiting other industrialized nations—what I call “real countries”: Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia, and the like. Places that have advanced health care, modern telecommunications, democratic polities, respect for human rights, and abundant consumer goods. The United States remains freer and the opportunities remain better than in most of these states. But any American could live a prosperous and reasonably free life in them.

That’s not the case with much of the globe, however. The bulk of the world’s population lives in poverty and oppression. People spend their entire lives without opportunity or hope. The need for real reform—that is, freedom—is so much greater there.

For instance, journey to the border between Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). I’ve gone several times with a group called Christian Freedom International (CFI; www.christianfreedom.org), which works on humanitarian and religious liberty issues. In this case, it assists ethnic Karen refugees displaced by the Burmese military.

Roughly 100,000 Karen live in refugee camps near the city of Maesot in western Thailand. Wooden huts cover undulating hills as far as the eye can see. The physical facilities are primitive, but people have organized themselves, especially around several churches (the Karen were converted by Christian missionaries in the mid-1800s). They are fed, housed, and clothed. Yet many people have been there for years; children have been born in the camps. None see any prospect of going back to their ancestral homes anytime soon.

Even worse are conditions in eastern Burma. Up to three million people have been displaced by decades of war. The junta’s forces move in, rape the women, conscript men as porters, kill the villagers’ livestock, destroy the buildings, and sow landmines to prevent people from returning. Two years ago government forces eradicated one small village just over the Moie river inside Burma six weeks after I visited.

Last summer I went to a larger, semi-permanent camp, protected by guerrillas with the Karen National Union (KNU). At least they have formal privies, in contrast to other villages deeper in the hills. And the meeting building and “freedom hospital” supported by CFI have electricity, which is absent elsewhere.

Still, it is impossible to escape not just dirt, but mud during the rainy season. Jungle green encroaches a few yards away. Only the careless would wander into hills covered with landmines and vulnerable to Burmese military attack.

Moreover, there is no hope for peace or prosperity. I met soldiers as young as 13, teenagers whose parents had been murdered by government troops. I met KNU soldiers in their 30s or 40s who have fought and killed for their entire adult lives. I met Burmese defectors who prefer uncertain exile to forced service under government thugs in Rangoon.

Life in Pakistan

Or journey to Pakistan. I went there last year as well. It is a military dictatorship, where General-President Pervez Musharaff has rigged the electoral process to create a democratic facade for his authoritarian rule. As in most of the Third World, state mismanagement of the economy has resulted in mass poverty.

On top of that is state-supported discrimination against minority faiths. Converts from Islam are often murdered. Non-Muslims find themselves prosecuted for blasphemy. No one even bothers to mouth the principle of equal rights under the law.

Worse, far worse, is North Korea. There are executions, mass starvation, and labor camps. And a stifling personality cult. Never, ever, speak ill of the Great Leader and Dear Leader. Commemorate them by photos in every room and buttons on every breast.

It’s been a decade since I traveled to the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but what I most remember is the lack of life on the streets. Masses of people walking, but never a group leaving a restaurant laughing. Never anyone having an animated conversation. Just silent souls streaming by, crushed by a system dedicated to squeezing out the slightest spark of creativity and individuality.

Obviously, many Americans face serious challenges, some of them life-threatening. But most problems here pale in comparison to those burdening the average Burmese Karen, Pakistani, and North Korean. In the United States hardship is real, but an exception. For so many other people elsewhere it is a way of life, for one’s entire life.

Seeing so many people in such straits highlights our responsibility for others, the obligation of those to whom much has been given to help those in great need. Moreover, such situations illustrate how the best way to help others is through private voluntary organizations that show up in isolated lands to feed and train people, create orphanages and schools, and maintain medical facilities. U.N. humanitarian agencies operate in Maesot, but none of them will work against the wishes of Burma’s brutal junta to help save Karen children who have stepped on land mines or been infected with malaria on the other side of the river. CFI will, even in the most primitive and distant village and at significant risk to its own personnel.

In Pakistan Christians routinely are denied access to basic services, such as electricity, available to Muslim neighbors across a street or field. And aid workers complained that the government manipulated foreign assistance for its own ends, rewarding its supporters and denying funds to disfavored groups. Looking to government for help is the path to starvation. Only private aid really turns out to be aid.

Not that this is always a good answer. Private groups can’t do much in North Korea. Some provide food, but their activities are constrained by Pyongyang’s dictates. Still, every little bit of private engagement helps, though often only a little bit.

Although I’ve always disliked jingoistic nationalism, even when applied to the United States, going to places like these causes me to grasp my American passport a little—actually, a lot—tighter. There is much wrong here. We desperately need to free our people, while addressing the sometimes desperate human needs that rightly unsettle our consciences. Even so, America remains a beacon of liberty for the world.

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1. Potomac Principles
2. Potomac Principles ~ Making Terrorists Pay
3. Potomac Principles-The Constitution According to George Bush

The draft has been dead for more than a quarter century. Despite a rocky start, the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) now provides America with the highest quality military in its history and the finest armed services in the world. Yet recruiting and retention problems have begun to appear. As a result, there are an increasing number of calls for a return to conscription.

The draft was bad policy during the Cold War. It would constitute amazing foolishness today. Renewed conscription would simultaneously reduce the quality of new servicemen and increase the cost of raising a military. A draft would also sacrifice the very constitutional liberties that the military is charged to defend.

Congress adopted the first peacetime draft in 1940, when war was raging in Europe. Conscription persisted—with but a brief 15-month hiatus—until 1973.

Now, however, a growing chorus on behalf of conscription is being heard.

Memo to Washington: We’re at Peace

That Washington is even discussing a return to a draft is bizarre. The United States is at peace. Washington stands astride the globe as a colossus—its enemies are pathetic and its allies are secure. Together with its allies, America accounts for roughly 80 percent of the globe’s military outlays. Allied states like France are abandoning conscription.

Still, advocates of conscription point, among other things, to poor recruiting results. In 1999 every service aside from the Marines had a difficult time. Moreover, the services are losing pilots and other selected skill grades, such as computer technicians. Critics also lament the expense of recruiting new soldiers.

Yet the military’s problem is not inadequate recruits, but inadequate quality recruits. Major General Evan Gaddis, commanding general of the Army, reports that of roughly nine million males between the ages of 17 and 21, “only 14 percent are the high quality, fully qualified and available prospects all military services want to recruit.” The Pentagon could solve its recruiting problems tomorrow if it simply lowered its standards modestly to those of a conscript military. That would leave the AVF with a far higher quality force than during the draft era. Observes Gordon Sullivan, former Army chief of staff and current president of the Association of the United States Army: “Military commanders prefer high-quality volunteers to mixed-quality draftees.”

The AVF attracts superior personnel for two important reasons. First, the services can reject people who haven’t graduated from high school and so-called Category IVs and Vs—people who score well below average on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Moreover, a volunteer military draws people who want to be there, creating a dramatically different and more positive dynamic compared to a conscript army.

Career retention has long been a Pentagon concern. However, conscription brings in untrained first-termers, not experienced pilots. And draftees, who don’t want to be in uniform, re-enlist in far lower numbers than volunteers.

Coercion Not Cheaper

Nor is coercion cheaper than voluntarism. There would be some savings in recruiting costs, but even radical pay cuts would save little, since first-term volunteers earn the least in the military. Moreover, any such savings would be offset by increased costs elsewhere, such as more generous re-enlistment pay and bonuses to build and retain a career force. On top of that would be the costs of classification, induction, and enforcement.

In fact, the Reagan administration’s Military Manpower Task Force concluded in 1982 that a return to the draft would actually hike costs by about $1 billion annually. A draft would also generate significant avoidance activities, economic dislocations, and other social costs.

The alleged unrepresentativeness of the volunteer force rankles some. But conscription would fail to deliver a more representative force. The notion that the military is dominated by unqualified minorities and lower-class whites is a ridiculous myth. Compared to the conscript force, the AVF has a few more African-Americans, high- school graduates, above-average students, and members of the middle class, and a few less college graduates, Hispanics, and members of the under-class and upper-class. It is quintessentially middle America.

Despite the endless, and endlessly ferocious, arguments over representativeness, the most important point may be how little conscription would affect the composition of today’s force. Since few draftees re-up, conscription would primarily change the composition of the transient pool of new recruits.

Are there any other reasons to conscript today? One argument is to fulfill all of America’s new commitments: Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti, Kosovo, Macedonia, Somalia, and who knows where else in the future. However, even if there is some merit to what Johns Hopkins University professor Michael Mandelbaum has derisively called “foreign policy as social work,” there is no justification for forcing young Americans to suit up to patrol a new colonial empire. Such conflicts are not worth the bones of a single healthy American rifleman.

The only other argument with any resonance is that conscription would enforce the moral duties of citizenship. Of course, we all do have important moral obligations. But those duties are owed to others in society, not to the state. And they are owed by everyone, not just 18-year-old males (and possibly females). It is all too convenient for well-paid professionals beyond draft age to sit in the comfort of their offices and pontificate about the duty of young people to serve everyone else.

A volunteer military places the defense burden on everyone. Through it society calls upon patriotic youth to join the military, while sending the bill to old and young alike. At the same time, it withholds from government the extraordinary (and dangerous) power to order citizens to fight and die. This is the proper way for a republic dedicated to the protection of individual liberty to defend itself.

Still, there is no gainsaying that the AVF suffers some problems with recruiting and retention. What to do? Most important, Washington should return to a foreign policy appropriate to a republic rather than an empire. Adjusting America’s foreign policy would reduce pressure on the armed forces. With a smaller force less frequently deployed, the Pentagon would need fewer first-termers and careerists, NCOs, and officers. Both recruiting and retention problems would disappear.

It is important never to forget that the military is a means to an end, not the end. The purpose of America’s armed forces is to defend a free society built on respect for and protection of individual liberty. That is ultimately the most important reason to reject conscription.

Related posts:

1. The Conscription Idea
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3. A Life-Saving Lesson from Operation Desert Storm